The Virgin Suicides Wiki
"The Trees, like Lungs, filling with Air, my Sister, the Mean one, pulling my Hair..." -''The Virgin Suicides'' 'The Virgin Suicides' The Virgin Suicides is a highly praised 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan suburbia in the mid-1970s, centers around the bizzare and haunting suicides of five beautiful American teenage sisters known as the Lisbon. Their legendary suicides fascinate their community as their neighbors struggle to find an explanation for their shocking acts and solve the mystery of what was lost. Twenty years later the now five long dead girls enigmatic personalities are still engraved in the minds and hearts of the neighborhood boys who secretly loved them. In 1999 the novel was made into a successful and critically acclaimed debut film by director Sofia Coppola, starring actress Kirsten Dunst as the most rebellious sister and focal point character, Lux Lisbon and actor Josh Hartnett as Lux's love interest, Trip Fontaine. The Five Glittering Lisbon Daughters... "The two Lisbon parents, leached of color, like photographic negatives. Then, the five glittering Lisbon daughters, in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, their skin, bursting with their fructifying flesh..." ''-The Virgin Suicides'' Michigan, Circa 1975... In a decaying suburb filled with dying fish flies and dying elm trees on the outskirts of Detroit, the Lisbons are a religious catholic family of seven. Mr. Lisbon is a geeky math teacher who teaches at a nearby private school, the mother, Mrs. Lisbon is a very strict and square homemaker. The parents have five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, the dreamer, 14-year-old Lux, the rebel, 15-year-old Bonnie, the saint, 16-year-old Mary the girly girl, and 17-year-old Therese, the scholar. The mystique of the Lisbon girls is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys, the narrators of the novel who describe the girls as all incredibly beautiful with long blonde hair and blue eyes. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgin Suicides'' The sisters lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a "misfit" who bites her nails while obsessively wearing a ill fitting vintage 1920's wedding dress, attempts suicide by cutting her wrists open in the bath. She is found in time to be rushed to the hospital and as a result she survives. After visiting a therapist, the Lisbon parents are told to let their daughters have a little more freedom and interaction with males their own age, believing this will be healthy for the girls. A few weeks later, a chaperoned basement party is thrown and the Lisbons invite the neighborhood boys over. When the boys arrive they finally can see the authenticity of each girl, but the boys confess it is Lux Lisbon who is undeniably the most beautiful and ideal sister out of the Lisbon girls. During this event Cecilia excuses herself only to walk upstairs and deliberately jump from her second story bedroom window and dies by being impaled by a sharp spiked iron fence post below. The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the Lisbon family are popular subjects of neighborhood gossip. Shorty after Cecilia's wake, the boys get ahold of her Diary, which they discover is filled with short poems and random entries. The boys also find it interesting that Cecilia refers to her and her sisters as one entity, thus concluding that Cecilia was a "dreamer" who was completely out of touch with reality. Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly -''The Virgin Suicides'' Unable to truly fathom the girls, the boys day dream and fantasize about the Lisbon sisters in dreamy and gauzy settings and wonder how the girls truly feel and what they think. The Lisbon girls run wildly and freely around in the boys imaginations like fleeting visions, unfathomable and unattainable. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgins Suicides'' When summer is over school begins, and the four remaining Lisbon girls attend class with their peers as if nothing ever happened, which only make the sisters even more captivating. Soon Lux Lisbon begins a hot and heavy romance with local heartthrob and teen womanizer Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a Homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. When Trip arrives to the Lisbon house on the evening of the dance with the dates to pick up Lux and her sisters, the boys are left speechless as the girls descend from the staircase as if angels from heaven. Despite the fact that their dream dresses are too big and described as four identical sacks, the girls appearance is breathtaking nonetheless. When the night progresses everything seems to be going fairly well as the boys shockingly realize just how normal and down to earth the Lisbon girls are. Once at the dance, Lux and Trip win Queen and King of Homecoming and after they are crowned Trip ditches the dance and disappears with Lux to have sex on the high school football field. After taking Lux's virginity, the magic ends and he immediately abandons her and as a result Lux misses her curfew and comes home hours after her sisters. Consequently as punishment, the Lisbons become recluses as Mrs. Lisbon pulls all her daughters out of school, believing that it would help the girls recover from Cecilia's death. However, despite her attempt to protect the girls from the dangers of the outside world, over the winter, Lux is seen having sex on the roof nightly with random boys and men. The boys spy on Lux from the street across and watch her make love to these faceless males, yet who they are and how Lux met them is a mystery. A few months after Lux is sent to the hospital because of a pregnancy scare—which her parents were told was simply indigestion—Mr. Lisbon officially takes a leave of absence. Their house falls into a deeper state of disrepair; the front yard goes unranked, garbage piles up and dozens of Newspapers lay upon the door step of the house. No Lisbon leaves and no one visits. The only time the Lisbon family is ever seen is on sunday when they attend church but even that doesn't last. Soon, a very strange rotting smell coming from the Lisbon house permeates the entire block on the neighborhood. From a safe distance, all the people in the neighborhood watch the Lisbons' lives deteriorate, but no one can summon up the courage to help or intervene. Months pass by, and the Lisbons sink futher and further into a virtual state of limbo and isolation, yet they become increasingly fascinating to the neighborhood in general as everyone notices that the girls have turned Cecilia's second story bedroom window into a holy shrine. The boys eventually make contact with the Lisbon girls and decided to call them to communicate by playing records over the telephone for the girls, unable to find the right words to express their feelings, they say it through music. Finally, the girls send a message to the boys one night to come to the their house. Shortly after the boys arrive they meet Lux who is all alone, and calmly smoking a cigarette. She tells the boys to wait quietly inside for her sisters to come while she leaves the house to go into the garage to "start the car", leaving the boys to believe they will flee the country with the girls and elope. But the boy's fantasies are shattered when they witness three of the Lisbon sisters kill themselves: Bonnie hangs herself, Therese overdoses on sleeping pills, and Lux dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Mary attempts suicide by putting her head in the oven, but fails. Mary continues to live for another month spending her time sleeping and obsessively showering before successfully ending her life by taking sleeping pills like Therese on the same day as another girl's Debutante party. Newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides come a year after Cecilia's first attempt. After the suicide "free-for-all," Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon sell the house and flee the neighborhood, never to be seen again. The house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area and most of the Lisbons' personal effects are either thrown out or sold in a garage sale. The narrators scavenge through the trash to collect much of the "evidence" they mention, collecting whatever they could find and save these items like valuable souvenirs. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws. -''The Virgin Suicides'' Twenty years later the boys are still obsessed with the girls who they feel were selfish for killing themselves. But they claim to be secretly still in love with all of them despite being middle aged men and having families of their own now. The story ends with the men concluding that they will never be able to put the peices of the five legendary suicides back together and find a satisfying answer to end the mystery surrounding the girls and their tragic actions. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. -''The Virgin Suicides'' The Lisbon Deaths Cecilia Lisbon Cecilia is the first sister to die. She attempts Suicide by slitting her wrist in the bathtub but is unsuccessful. A few weeks later she succeeds to commit Suicide by jumping out her second story bedroom window and lands on the iron fence below. She is stabbed by one of the sharp spikes that goes straight through her heart. "Mr. Lisbon was trying to lift her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and ripping the dress and finding the air again" (Eugenides 37). "She had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world." (Eugenides 38). Luxie Lisbon Lux commits Suicide by shutting herself up in the garage with the family station wagon on and dies by poison carbon monoxide. "They found her in the front seat, grey faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm" (Eugenides 281). Bonnie Lisbon In the basement, the group of neighborhood boys find Bonnie, first they see a pair of legs swinging from the rafters to look up and see that she has hanged herself with a rope. "Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a pinata" (Eugenides 280)." Mary Lisbon Mary commits suicide by putting her head in the kitchen oven with the gas on right when she hears Bonnie kick her suitcase over in the basement. "They found Mary in the kitchen, not dead but nearly so, her head and torso thrust into the oven as though she was scrubbing it" (Eugenides 284). Mary's first attempt at death fails but she gets it right on her second try by overdosing on sleeping pills like her older sister Therese a month later. "The last Lisbon daughter, Mary, in a sleeping bag, and full of sleeping pills" (Eugenides 309). Therese Lisbon Therese's method of choice was overdosing on sleeping pills and gin up in one of the girl's shared bedrooms. The sleeping pills were probably stolen from her mother, who Lux mentions is an insomniac. "Another reporter ended his broadcast by reading a letter Therese had written to the Brown's admissions officer only three days before she put an end to any dreams of college...or of anything else" (Eugenides 291). 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